The invention relates to microcircuit cards.
Nowadays, these cards are used in numerous applications such as payment at a point of sale (known as the "bank card" application), public telephones, paying for parking, paying for TV, mobile telephones (GSM), health services, public transport, or electronic purse.
These applications are becoming more and more numerous, and their use is becoming more and more widespread.
Each of these applications is associated with a specific card: a bank card, a phone card, a parking card, an IC card for a television decoder, a SIM card for GSM telephony, etc.
One of the problems encountered in daily use of such a variety of cards lies in such-and-such a card of a type required by any specific one of these applications being accidentally unavailable, whether because it has been forgotten, because it is empty or has run out, or because it is invalid or has expired.
This problem is made worse by the fact that certain types of card are sometimes poorly distributed, or are used so rarely that it is quite likely they will not be in the user's pocket at all times. A typical case is that of parking cards, which are issued and usable in any one given city only, and for which a need can arise when the user is far away from any sales point that is open.
To remedy that drawback, proposals have been made to provide so-called "multi-application cards", e.g. making it possible to pay for a public telephone by means of a bank card.
Such multi-application cards are technically feasible, but in practice they are administratively very difficult to implement, as has been demonstrated by numerous pioneering attempts ever since the invention of the IC card itself.